What desire drove this? A peculiar longing to touch death, to possess a body that had outlasted empires. For some, it was necrophilic in the psychological sense—an attraction to the absolute stillness of the preserved corpse. The novelist Algernon Blackwood wrote of a man who fell in love with a mummy in the British Museum, sleeping in the gallery at night. Fiction, perhaps. But the number of security incidents involving visitors trying to kiss or caress the Egyptian sarcophagi suggests otherwise.
E. M. Forster’s Maurice , written in 1913 but published posthumously, hints at this geography of desire. The protagonist finds freedom not in Cambridge but in the greenwood—a pre-industrial, almost pagan Britain. Similarly, many colonial administrators found that distance from the Drawing Room allowed for peculiar arrangements. The diaries of Colonel Arthur Conyngham (1847–1923), discovered in a trunk in Gloucestershire in 2012, detail a thirty-year “domestic partnership” with a Punjabi horse trainer named Zulfiqar. The colonel’s peculiar desire was not for the exoticized “native,” but for a mundane, boring, monogamous love that the Empire’s laws rendered illegal at home but invisible abroad. The Chronicles of Peculiar Desires in the Briti...
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Arthur spent the night "feeding" the collection. He brought a bowl of strawberries for the snuff box, played recordings of thunderstorms for the Roman coin, and angled a high-powered flashlight to mimic the Egyptian sun for the amulet. What desire drove this
In the 18th century, the ultimate "must-have" accessory for the wealthy British landowner was not a fountain or a statue, but a living hermit The novelist Algernon Blackwood wrote of a man